Page:Allan Octavian Hume, C.B.; Father of the Indian National Congress.djvu/172

 to have given to a Party the talents designed to serve man- kind. Would you, following this erring example, give to two minor questions those powers designed to serve the national cause as a whole ? Believe me, it would be not only to inflict on your country an irreparable loss — for there is no other single man whose services she could less easily spare — but it would be a sin against your own soul, like his who hid his talent in the napkin.

One single example will bring home to any thinking mind the extent to which the country suffers, by 'this premature speciaHzation, and by the absence of co-operation and sympathy, and the lack of unity of purpose, amongst even true would-be reformers, working in different, and even in the same directions. In this age of materialism, when ex- isting faiths. Eastern and Western, seem alike losing all vital hold upon the hearts of their votaries, when the glamour of this material world seems to blind mankind to the ex- istence of other states, of which this present life is but an infinitesimal fragment — when *' eat and drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die," seems almost the only living creed — there is no one more important question than that of the moral and spiritual culture of the nation. Morality is the sole rock upon which national prosperity can be securely based — all other foundations are but as shifting sands. The old safeguards of national morality here are crumbling into ruin. To teach men once more the beauty and happiness of pure lives and pure thoughts is perhaps the greatest requisite of all if that national regeneration, for which we all sigh, is ever to be more than a dream. Throughout the length and breadth of the land are scat- tered, thinly it is true, men, the salt of the earth, Hindus, Christians, Mohammedans and votaries of other innumerable sects — men to whom pure lives and lofty aspirations are as the air to us grosser mortals ; who give their time and hearts, and would gladly give their lives, to leading other souls along the holy paths that they have trodden to find peace — men who have really one common object, the moral exaltation of their fellows — men who if they could only